ORATORY STARTED CHAPIN.
The Prosy Addresses of Fourth-of-July
Speakers Goaded Him On to the
Study of Declamation.
"It was not because I happened to have long legs that I decided to put myself as Abraham Lincoln into a play."
So said Benjamin Chapin when I approached him with a request to talk a bit for the benefit of The Scrap Book readers.
And when I saw the man out of character I could not blame him for being a little ruffled at the persistent press talk about his doing the Lincoln play because he looked like the famous President. I had gone so far into this belief myself that I was distinctly amazed when the door opened to admit a young man, one not much more than thirty, I should say. The face is long, to be sure, and the frame loose-jointed, but Mr. Chapin's features blend into rather an attractive composite, and Mr. Lincoln, as everybody knows, never laid any claims to good looks.
"Why did I elect to do Lincoln, then?" Mr. Chapin went on. "Because it was the hardest thing of any to do. Any man with the proper amount of ambition in him likes to tackle and overcome difficulties, and in placing our first martyred President on the stage I realized to the full how carefully I must work to keep from falling into pits that would open up on every side of me. But you want to know how I came to go into this line of work at the very beginning, don't you?
"Let me see! I should say the foundations were laid when I was a small boy of ten—out in my native State of Ohio. I used to listen to the Fourth-of-July orators talk on in their prosy way, in a dull monotone, and on Sundays the preachers would speak in the same dismal manner.
"'Why don't they convince the people that they are in earnest?' I would say to myself"—and Mr. Chapin let out his voice in a fashion that made the rafters of the small room ring. "That's the way I felt about the power of the voice even at that early era.
"One summer we were having a picnic—I think it was a Sunday-school affair. Anyhow, there were to be speeches by the boys and girls out in the woods. I wouldn't rehearse mine. You see, I had made up my mine[** mind] to surprise folks. Nobody had ever heard me speak before, and here was the chance to live up to my own theories.
"What my selection was I cannot just recall. I think it was one of Will Carleton's descriptive ballads. Anyway, I let myself out on it in a fashion that made everybody gasp with wonder. And so the thing began. I knew then that my life-work must be something in which I could appeal to the public through the medium of the voice.
"I thought of law for a while, then had a hankering after politics. Finally I drifted into the line of impersonations through monologues.
"I have been working on the drama of 'Lincoln' for years. The version I am doing is by no means the only one I have written around the war-time President, but it seemed to be the one, all things considered, best adapted for the stage."
For the past half-dozen years Mr. Chapin has been all over the country on the lecture platform, but he has by no means confined himself to Lincoln. He has impersonated, among others, Rip Van Winkle and Cyrano de Bergerac. He has great ambitions in the direction of playwriting.
"I have discovered," he told me in this connection, "that if a play does not elicit from its audience over two hundred distinct expressions of approval, in the shape either of laughs, applause, or that almost imperceptible stir of expectancy, it is a failure."